Urban civil defence: imagining, constructing and performing nuclear war in Aarhus

Abstract

During the Cold War, cities were seen as likely targets of modern total warfare and systems of civil defence were created to protect cities and their inhabitants. Yet existing civil defence histories have focused little on the specifically urban aspect, and urban historians likewise have paid civil defence little attention. Using Aarhus, Denmark, as a case-study, this article examines civil defence through planning, practices and materiality in a specific urban landscape. By analysing how civil defence was organized, performed and built in Denmark, the article sheds light on the mutual imbrication of urban planning, geography and materiality and local civil defence. I argue that through biopolitics, local civil defence authorities imagineered an idealized survivalist community of city dwellers who would pull together to protect and save their city and that this contributed to taming an incomprehensible, global, nuclear catastrophe into a manageable, localized, urban calamity.

Normalising Nuclear War: Narrative Scenarios, Imaginative Geographies and Sites of Leisure in 1950s Britain

“…Although beyond the scope of this chapter, international Cold War research suggests that we can detect similarities in how imaginaries translated into civil defence practice in different national contexts. Observations in recent research on 1950s Denmark (Farbøl 2020) suggest that parallels might be drawn when looking at how national policy was translated to localised contexts, particularly when looking at how civil defence leadership attempted to achieve the impression of realism during exercises. It is hoped that this chapter has offered one way to conceptualise the local-national-international analytical frame in relation to sociotechnical imaginaries.…”